How to obtain free answers from Experts-Exchange.com

I am sure for many of your assignments or questions in general, you have used Google or any of the search engines to get a headstart into your research in your quest to get an answer to your problem. However, what you get in return from your search result is a whole bunch of irrelevant information thrown at you. Using advanced operators usually helps solve this problem, however sometimes you get lucky and the answer is usually staring at your face. Most likely the answer you are seeking is usually provided by a pay/subscription site. One of the more prominent ones in this category is Experts Exchange. Here, I am going to tell you probably one of the more wide known secrets in accessing hidden information from pay/subscription sites and in general for this article, targetted towards getting answers for FREE from experts exchange.

 

Method # 1: Using Google Cache

For demonstration, I am trying to look on how to covert C code into Assembly. Now, if I enter this query in Google, I get some pretty decent results. Now, we are trying to look for a solution at Experts Exchange. So, I go to google.com and type in covert c code to assembly site:experts-exchange.com. The ’site:’ is an advanced operator in google which limits our search results to that particular website and in this case, it is experts-exchange.

We click on the first search result on the experts-exchange.com article with no solution but a button stating View Solution.

If you click on the View Solution link, you are redirected to a page telling you that you need to subscribe to view the solution. Not today though!!

Go back to the google results page and click on Cached which loads a cached version of that webpage.

Guess what ? The cached page holds all the answers to the question right at the bottom. Just scroll down and see for yourself.

 

 

Method # 2: Using the User Agent Switcher extention in Firefox

The User Agent Switcher extension adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser. It is designed for Firefox, Flock, Mozilla and Seamonkey, and will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. You can get the User Agent Switcher extention from Firefox. This method would help us automate the above procedure in case you wanted to do something like this in the future

Since it’s fair to assume that the search engine spider could see the full answer to index it, I’ve always just switched my user agent to a Googlebot before browsing Experts Exchange. They were just looking at the Browser’s user-agent (A HTTP Header that identifies the requesting Browser) to let Google’s robot through but not me. So all I had to do to see this content was pretend to be the Google’s robot. Changing User-agent in IE is possible but very cumbersome. But I would not recommend it because a lot of other things like windowsupdate , sites that use browser detection instead of object detection in javascript will be very confused. I would instead suggest doing this in firefox or Flock and the ‘User Agent Switcher’ extension supports both these browsers.

Once you install the user agent for your browser, close and restart your browser. Go to Tools –> User Agent Switcher –>Options –> Options –> User Agents

Under User Agents, click add and add the following information as shown from below

Congratulations!! You are all set now. All you need to do is turn of Javascript in your browser. Go to User Agent Switcher, choose Google Bot, visit the site(experts-exchange) or any other and watch as the solution shows up too. You can use this if you want to go to any Internet Explorer Only site by switching the User Agent to IE.